Virtual Representation Theory

I took an independent graduate seminar with Dr. Paula Backscheider at Auburn University last spring, and I became interested in studying the representations of African women found in 18th-century iconography and texts. For further research into this topic, I applied for a grant that would allow me to study maps of Africa at the Library of Congress in D.C. and at the Johns Hopkins Library in Baltimore, MD. As I became more fascinated by the visual representations of African women found on these maps of Africa produced by British cartographers during the eighteenth-century, I realized that the cultural implications of this study had not yet been fully exploited.

This website presents my Masters Thesis Project - "The Transatlantic Signifier: African Women Imaged in Eighteenth-Century British Iconography and Texts" - with 20+ images.

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When used in literary criticism and cultural studies, "representation theory" is defined as the construction of identity through the dominant images found in a culture. Once disseminated throughout the culture, these dominant images gain meaning and have the power to define or depict a group or an individual. These visual representations oftentimes create powerful stereotypes that marginalize and continue to silence an oppressed group that is being defined by the dominant power structure.

Using Edward Said's theory of the Other, bell hooks' representation theory, and Pierre Bourdieu's theory of language and symbolic power, this study explores the politics of the visual and textual representations of African women's bodies, primarily in a few significant cultural artifacts: in travel narratives; John Ogilby's atlas of Africa (1670), William Snellgrave's New Account of Guinea (1734), John Atkins' Voyage to Guinea(1735), and John Stedman's Narrative to Surinam (1790); in a few maps of Africa produced by British cartographers; Charles Price (1711), John Senex and John Maxwell (173?), and Robert Sayer (1787); in George Richardson's Iconology (1776), and in an important fiction of the period; Aphra Behn's Oroonoko (1688). During the eighteenth-century British slave-trade, the African woman's body was an object to gaze at, an object to write about, and an object to illustrate by the imperialist power that conquered colonial countries and enslaved and brutalized African bodies, and studying the iconography and texts will reveal how those in power constructed the body of knowledge known as the "African woman."

IMAGE CREDITS

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